Lessons learned from Ingenuity Mars helicopter will play into designs for follow-on craft

Nearly a year after NASA's Ingenuity helicopter crash landed on Mars following an extended, remarkably successful mission, engineers have determined the most likely culprit: Flight over sand drifts so featureless that on-board sensors could not determine the helicopter's orientation and velocity.

The result was a "hard" sideways landing on a steep slope that spun Ingenuity about so fast its rotors, spinning at nearly 400 mph to provide lift in the ultra-thin martian atmosphere, suffered structural failure. One broke off and the others were severely damaged.

Håvard Grip, Ingenuity's first pilot, said in an interview Wednesday that lessons learned from Ingenuity's 72nd and final flight on Jan. 18 will be fed into designs for more powerful Mars helicopters now being studied at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where Ingenuity was built.